In order to properly and accurately diagnose cardiac conditions, it is important for the physician to have clear and clean cardiograms at his or her disposal. Therefore, an acquisition system for cardiac behavior must capture electrophysiological signals accurately as small as 6 uV. These signals must be captured with very little noise, and displayed, stored and sent to other medical equipment in a real-time manner.
These electrophysiological signals must be filtered in a number of ways and the captured data within the signals must reject artifacts caused by other equipment, such as pacemaker or ablation devices. Current systems offer various trade-offs in terms of speed, noise and resolution. In other words, the additional cabling in all current systems acts as an antenna for stray electromagnetic signals, and as a result, constitutes a primary noise source in those systems. Many current systems have 16 or less bits of A/D resolution and sample at typical low ranges of 1 to 2 KHz. Furthermore, current systems do not typically embody a quick real-time response for data capture and display, nor do they include complete modularity.